Remember when you read this, the Chinese authorities are doing the following to rights lawyers and without trying to hide it.
Also we’d like to see some of the bigger publishers step up to then plate on this issue..we’ll ask nicely
“please”
The BBC reports
For Xie Yanyi it was not the physical abuse that was the hardest to endure – although his list of the deliberate cruelties inflicted upon him is long.
He was kept in a stress position, crouched on a low stool, from 06:00 in the morning until 22:00 at night.
After 15 days like this, he tells me, his legs went numb and he had difficulty urinating.
At times he was denied food and was subjected to gruelling interrogations for “dozens of hours” on end.
He was beaten.
And he was watched while he slept, with his guards insisting that he kept the same sleeping position all night.
But harder to bear than all of this, Mr Xie insists, was the time spent in solitary confinement.
“I was kept alone in a small room and saw no daylight for half a year. I had nothing to read, nothing to do but to sit on that low stool.”
“People could go mad in that situation. I was isolated from the world. This is torture – the isolation is more painful than being beaten.”
Although impossible to verify, his account tallies with other reports of the suffering endured under the so-called “war on law”, launched during the Chinese Leader Xi Jinping’s first five years in office.
Only in Mr Xie’s case it is a rare, first-hand account.
